Introducing Crossword Forge 7

The professional crossword puzzle maker (and word search maker) for Mac and Windows

Crossword Forge 7 combines lightning speed and unmatched flexibility to construct eye-catching puzzles with ease. The Crossword Forge puzzle engine (or crossword compiler) has been completely re-written in C++, and now takes advantage of modern computers with multiple processor cores. You will see dramatic speed improvements on any computer - from the smallest Windows netbook to the latest 12 core Mac Pros.

This exciting new version of Crossword Forge really takes you to the next level in speed, simplicity, and performance, adding new English variations and four completely new languages to Word Ideas (formerly known as Word Suggester), new settings, and Quick-look previews. Additionally, Crossword Forge 7 preserves all the high-powered features you have come to love and rely on, clearly laying claim to being the best in its field.

What's New in your favorite crossword creator software

Word Ideas When you are looking for just the right word Word Ideas is the the tool of choice. An ideal word might be a word that perfectly fits your puzzle's theme or increases your puzzle density. Now Word Ideas are no longer limited to American English.Now for the first time, Crossword Forge 7 brings you Word Ideas in four different variations of English (American, British, Canadian, and Australian) and amazingly, also in Spanish, German, French, and Italian.Learn more...

Quick Look™ Version 7 includes QuickLook integration for Mac Users. You can see a preview of your puzzle from the Mac's Finder (or anywhere QuickLook is supported) without opening the file. This feature works for individual files or a group of files; this is fantastic for quickly hunting down an old puzzle.

Prefer High Letter Count We've given you more control over the puzzle engine. You can now decide whether you want the engine to prefer longer words, as opposed to preferring words whose letter frequency count is higher (the default). In some cases (e.g. when using a puzzle mask in conjunction with cryptic crosswords a.k.a. British-style) preferring longer words can improve the chances of finding the desired solution.

Fantastic New SpeedsWe conducted extensive testing using a variety of puzzles. The tests were run on netbooks, laptops, desktops and workstations, on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Each test was repeated numerous times to ensure consistent results. What we found may surprise you! Crossword Forge 7 makes the same high quality puzzles as earlier versions, but now does so 5 to 25 times faster than before. This means you can get your work done faster. It also means that you can take full advantage of what Crossword Forge has to offer without worrying about how long it's going to take. Crossword Forge truly is as fast as a rocket. Learn more...

About Crossword Forge - It's all about making puzzles

Newspaper Crosswords Now you can construct super-dense, newspaper-style puzzles with ease. If you have ever tried to make a newspaper-style crossword puzzle on graph paper, you know how challenging it can be to do by hand. Crossword setters or cruciverbalists, can combine Crossword Forge's powerful crossword engine, Mask Editor, Word Ideas, grid constraints and advanced settings to ensure puzzle making success. Crossword Forge makes it not only easier to create the puzzle, but facilitates publishing your puzzle too. Whether you intend to publish crosswords in the American-style, Japanese-style or British-style, Crossword Forge's PDF export can make the process significantly simpler.

Classroom Crosswords and Word SearchesCrossword Forge's high quality print and PDF output has been used in numerous books and newspapers. Now you can bring that power to your home or school. Learn how to make a simple puzzle in just a few steps. Crossword Forge is so easy to use that anyone can create word search and crossword puzzles on any subject. Change fonts, colors and even add a theme-specific backdrop picture to liven up your puzzle. Are you a teacher/coach/parent? Be sure to check out our teacher page for more great ideas on how to use Crossword Forge.

Crossword Forge Live Crossword Forge makes it painless to create high quality, interactive content that works on FireFox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera or any web browser that supports Flash. The puzzles are intuitive to use and include cool animations that players will be sure to love. Play an Interactive Puzzle Here!

Import/Export Import word lists or clue/answer pair lists from the clipboard or a tab delimited text file. Crossword Forge exports to text, pdf, image, and web. Learn more...Puzzle Extras Add variety and challenge to your puzzles by adding word banks with distractors or scrambled words, bonus questions for both crossword and word search puzzles, and word searches that require you to answer a question before finding the word.Spell Checker A built in Spell Checker to help ensure your puzzles are free from awkward or embarrassing spelling mistakes.

Puzzle Mask Editor Our Puzzle Mask feature lets you customize your puzzle like never before. Use the mask to exclude an area where you don't want the puzzle to form, e.g. on faces of a picture used as a backdrop. You can also modify the mask to make a fun shape, such as a geometrical figure. The Puzzle Mask editor is also extremely useful for re-constructing a newspaper crossword puzzle or creating symmetrical puzzles of your own. Learn more...

Foreign Language Support Crossword Forge has more than a dozen built-in language sets and an easy way to create your own. You can build puzzles that use letters with accents, umlauts and other diacritical marks, essential for building puzzles in Spanish, French and German. Crossword Forge also supports right to left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew, and supports scripts and alphabets with combining ligatures like Punjabi. In fact, it even supports the thousands of ideographic characters found in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Learn more...